8.5
126 Chapter 8: Session Managers, Desktop Environments, and Window Managers
8.5 Starting KDE
KDE uses a very different approach to initialization. Although KDE does have a session
manager, it does not start many of the KDE components. Instead, most of the
startup sequence is initiated by a script named startkde (imagine that, a KDE program
that doesn??™t start with k!):
$ startkde
Since startkde is a script, you can simply open it in a text editor to read or modify it.
startkde runs through a number of sanity checks, verifying that there is sufficient
temporary disk space available, the home directory is writable, and so forth. Finally,
it starts kdeinit, which starts a number of processes; some of these are normal binary
programs, and some are KDE loadable modules (KLMs). KLMs may load faster than
traditional binaries and are typically found in /usr/lib/kde3.
These are some of the key processes:
kwin
The KDE window manager.
dcopserver
The desktop communication server, which facilitates interprocess communication
between the the various KDE components.
ksmserver
The KDE session manager.
klauncher
The KDE service initializer. This does not start desktop applications, but starts
background services on request.
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